What Comes First

Flux Gallery, Victoria, BC, Canada, 2018.

What Comes First began during a residency at the Leighton's Artist Colony at the Banff Centre.

It started as a way to explore source material from the artist's painting practice that would likely never make it into a finished work. The project has since grown into an ongoing series of collaborative, process-based films in which artists interact with their own studio objects—items that are rarely detectable in the finished work.

What Comes First functions as an intercultural investigation, allowing for ideological differences and similarities in artistic approaches to be observed through direct comparison. In keeping with the tenets of relational aesthetics, the process of creating the films themselves—which include meeting various artists in their studios and discussing their practices and the practices of other participating artists—is considered part of the work. What Comes First seeks to disrupt the assumption of end-point art production by continually casting attention back to earlier, less polished/curated aspects of what artists do—and to the process of art-making as an end in itself.

The artist would like to thank all of the contributing artists for their generous participation and trust—Lydia Beauregard, Rande Cook, Lindsay Katsitsakatste Delaronde, Meagan Dickie, Miles Lowry, Sadie Nielsen, Lance Austin Olsen, Irma Soltonovich—and Joey MacDonald for his expertise as camera operator and editor.

What Comes First will be shown as part of the upcoming exhibition “Tender Works” at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria from October 2019–February 2020.